"You don't know anything about it, Maria. You never had the least taste yourself for anything but dress and going out."
"Well, you see, that's what makes it so surprising," said the younger sister, in an apologetic tone. "You have always thought me so frivolous, and yet I wouldn't think—no, not in my wildest moments—of being a sculptor."
As Valeria left the room, Mrs. Gano looked with pride after the tall, willowy figure.
"You must remember," she said, speaking unusually gently, "the Ganos are more artistic than we Calverts. Valeria has great talents."
But having talent altered little. Valeria beat her wings against the walls of the old Indian fortress all in vain. But she studied books, she got clay for modelling, and tools, and in secret wrought rude images that mocked her dreams. By-and-by she flung the tools aside, and the plastic clay that she had meant to fashion into forms of beauty hardened uncouthly into an unmeaning mass. An interim of aimlessness and despair of life was followed by a gradual healing of the spirit and restored activity of mind, through nothing more nor less than the power of poetry. Saturated with Keats and Shelley, she took up again her old childish habit of verse-making, but very seriously now, thinking of herself as a poet. Some hint of the way she passed her time, some whisper, through servants or others, of the reams of paper she engrossed with verse, got abroad in the town. She was asked to contribute to the Mioto Gazette, and was stopped on her way from church, by people she scarcely knew, to hear that her fellow-townsmen were full of curiosity and pride at having a poet among them. She was embarrassed, but not altogether displeased. Not so Mrs. Gano, whose favorite remark about the good people of New Plymouth was that they didn't know a B from a bull's foot. Of course they were impressed that any one in this benighted place should write verse!
"Just tell them the next time they bother you that the Ganos do it by the yard."
It was very difficult to impress this mother of hers, who took so much for granted.
"I think," said Valeria, with dignity, laying down a volume of Aurora Leigh—"I think I shall seriously devote myself to literature."
"Ah! then in that case be careful you don't adopt New Plymouth standards."